Adult learning is more than alternative education, self-help, self-study, or training. Self-directed inquiry can free you from the cultural traps of today’s postmodern world. When you think for yourself, you take control of your life. Intellectual ability and critical thinking soon become substitutes for paper credentials. Simply stated aggressive learning is the most practical guide to a passionately rewarding life.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

When it’s war, or even the threat of war,
we Americans pull out all stops and forge ahead, sparing no effort or expense,
to ensure victory. If needed, we will impose a draft, increase taxes, build
ships, aircraft, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction, the likes of which the
world has ever seen. On land, air, and sea, we will destroy any enemy that
threatens the lives of our citizens. If one of our soldiers is trapped behind
enemy lines, we will send whatever resources it takes to free the individual
from harm. If our troops are killed, we will go to extraordinary lengths to
retrieve their bodies, even risking others’ lives if necessary, and we will
continue these efforts for decades after war ends.

We maintain the largest and most
powerful military force on the planet in order to make it clear that attacking us
will be a suicidal mission. Protecting our citizens is so powerful an ethos
that we will even furnish legal services at public expense when a fellow American
is charged with a crime. After all, this could be a matter of life and death.

Suppose, though, that our fallen
soldier's mother, sister, aunt, or grandmother's life is threatened by an illness
like breast cancer, and she can't afford medical insurance. What do we do then?
Raise armies? Raise taxes? Send forth doctors and surgeons dressed in fatigues?
Not at all. Not only do we stand by and watch them die slowly from a lack of
treatment, but nearly half of our population characterizes attempts to remedy
this moral failure as an assault on their
freedom.

Indeed, in a way, freedom is at play
here—unlimited freedom for profits. The charge that Obamacare is a government
takeover of healthcare, actually means that the government is limiting the
ability of the insurance industry to make runaway profits at the expense of
medical treatment. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to incite
and inspire rage about this alleged loss of personal freedom.

So let's talk about freedom—like the
freedom to continue living when one is attacked by an illness that doesn't require
armies or multi-million dollar bombs to cure, only a health insurance policy that
works more for the benefit of patients rather than for insurance companies. Before
Obamacare, thousands of people hung onto jobs they despised simply because they
were afraid of losing their insurance. That's lack of freedom.

The argument that mandated insurance
coverage results in an actual loss of freedom is such an assault on common
sense and common decency that it defies any and all attempts to explain it in
the context of what it means to be protected under the umbrella of American
citizenship.

The current political polarization motivated
by the millions of dollars spent on behalf of the insurance lobby has become so
vitriolic that much of the goodwill that gives us a sense of national identity as
Americans has been lost. Blind rage stands in for civilized dialogue, as extreme
Tea Party types express an anxious willingness to sink the ship of state and
drown everyone if they can't have everything their own way. They view
themselves as the only true Americans.

Stopping at nothing to prevent a loss of
life in war and then looking the other way when private citizens are threatened—not
by an army, but by a lack of enough monetary resources to cover the cost of
treatment—is a kind of social madness that can only occur when benevolence is
trampled by seething contempt. Such derision is made possible by so alienating
one's opposition as to think them unworthy of being considered one of us. This
has to be the case unless being an American and having one's life threatened is
meaningless. Populist scorn has become so ubiquitous that an audience broke into
cheering at a presidential political debate earlier this year at the mere mention
of letting someone die who had elected not to purchase health insurance.

The current level of political insanity can
be seen for what it is when you realize fully that the blueprint for Obamacare
was drawn up by conservatives and only became toxic when the opposition adopted
it. The push for unfettered profit at the expense of medical care has resulted
in an orchestrated pandemic of political hostility paid for by the insurance
lobby. This is something to keep in mind when you vote in November: War and
serious illness are matters of life and death and should not be considered
profit centers or political talking points.

Our service men and women who have been
killed in battle deserve something more for the relatives they left behind than
derision and alienation because they need a doctor and don't have enough personal
wealth to cover the cost. If the people shouting about mandated insurance
encroaching on their personal freedom would stop listening to the rebel rousers
and simply think, they would realize that the sacrifices our service men and
women have made on the battlefield should cover the cost of those who can't
afford medical treatment. If being an American means anything, it means the
bill has been paid in full.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

When I was a teenager in the 1950s,
gasoline was cheap but cash was hard to come by. It was common practice to
carry a siphon hose in one's car because friends would frequently run out of
gas. With a hose you could get just enough gas from a friend's car to reach a
gas station without having to get a can and make two trips. The hose was also
useful for getting gas from the parents' vehicles.

A siphoning hose uses atmospheric
pressure and gravity to cause fluid to flow, once started, without further
efforts. When adequate pressure is reached, the flow continues unabated as long
as there is a sufficient source of liquid. This makes a great analogy for our
economy because the notion of using an economic stimulus works exactly like the
siphon hose. Get it going with sufficient force, and it will continue on its
own as long as there is a demand.

Jump-starting the economy versus austere
measures is an ideological hurdle in politics. Which method works best? What
has this got to do with job creation? Good questions, indicating it’s high time
to take a fresh look at conventional wisdom. My generation grew up in a world
where loyalty to one's employer was expected. It was supposed to be reciprocal,
but the economy was strong enough that loyalty to the employee was seldom put
to the test. Most people were prone to give their employer the benefit of the
doubt when it came to the question of allegiance. So, when one's attitude
toward their employer is to be grateful for having been employed, it just seems
like common sense to think of employers as job creators. Hold that thought for
a moment.

In the Midwest there are companies with
caravans of harvesting combines who travel northward harvesting wheat and other
crops in the summer and fall. It is cheaper for many farmers to hire a company
to harvest their crops instead of buying and maintaining the equipment
themselves. My point is that employers are more like harvesters than job
creators. The harvesters don't work unless something needs reaping, and likewise
most companies do not hire unless there is money to be made. Gratitude for
having been offered a job tends to obscure this reality. The expectation of
reciprocal loyalty over the past two decades has pretty much evaporated. The reality
has always been that employers don't hire people unless there is money on the
table or in the field, and it seems exceptionally naïve to have ever thought
otherwise.

More often than not, political usage of
the term job creator is deceptive.
The implication in pro-business political ads is that if we vote for a
candidate who is friendly to the job creators, then there will be more jobs.
Maybe, maybe not. In a nutshell, no demand, no customers, no jobs. But it
doesn't stop here. If the candidate is too friendly with the so-called job
creators, then the jobs are not likely to pay a living wage because the
employers will write all of the rules and laws.

Now there are companies that innovate
and offer new products, and in the process create their own demand. In effect,
they do create jobs. But for the most part, the nation's big corporate
employers are analogous to crop harvesters. When possible they ramp up to harvest
and cash in. There is nothing wrong with this, but keeping this reality in
political perspective is critical to the well-being of those who work for a
living and vote.

Stimulating the economy is like
siphoning gas: if it's not done with enough force, it won't flow with enough pressure
to keep going. Austerity won't get you far enough down the road to reach a gas
station, and the people promising to create jobs without a flowing economy are
talking through their hats. No demand, no flow, nothing to reap, no jobs. This
is not rocket science; it's not even a mysterious process when you stop drinking
the political Kool-Aid. Put the ideological rhetoric in perspective and admit
that a just society is a worthy goal and that working people count as much as
Wall Street executives.

Gratitude toward employers during the past
half-century has been so forceful and overwhelming that the right of an
entrepreneur to exploit workers with exceptionally low wages and degrading
working conditions has traditionally gotten a free pass. They act as if they
have a divine right to do this
because, after all, they are job creators.
It's long past time to think through the mythology and the glorious rights of
employers. If a task is worth doing and a job needs to be created, then it is
worth a living wage. If not, let the entrepreneurs or executives do it
themselves.